The first thinker to be considered is Philo of Alexandria, who lived from around 25 BCE to 50 CE. He was, to all accounts, an observant Jew and also a thoroughly Hellenised citizen of Alexandria. There is no evidence that he knew any Hebrew whatsoever, and he managed to argue that this hardly mattered, since the Septuagint translation into Greek was itself divinely inspired. Philo represented the assimilated Jew, assimilated in general cultural terms but not in religion, and in some ways he is thus a very modern figure, since many Jews today, like Philo, are not knowledgeable in Hebrew and rely on their secular culture to provide them with a language to approach the Bible. The language which they use is not just the language of the community in which they have been brought up, but it also involves the conceptual system of that environment. For Philo this was very much the system of Greek philosophy, which represented for him the acme of human reasoning. But once one tries to use a system like Greek philosophy to analyse religion a number of interesting problems arise. One is employing a methodology of extreme generality to discuss an entirely different system of some specificity. If the enterprise is to succeed, then it must be possible to use Greek philosophy to make sense of particular kinds of religious experience, very different kinds of religious experience from that which was described by the Greeks. As an assimilated thinker Philo was pulled in two different directions, towards the culture of Greece and at the same time to the culture for which the Bible was composed.